Innehållsförteckning för April 2019 från The Caravan

Shiva Raj was born on a footpath. He grew up on the streets. As a five year old, unable to afford a real football, he would kick around broken clay cups and paper balls. His earliest memories are of a sky bracketed by foliage, decrepit buildings and perforated plastic sheets, of huddling under cornices to prevent getting wet in the rains, of fighting for a little shade when the summer sun baked the tar on Chennai’s roads. His father repaired umbrellas and plastic buckets for a living. In the Margazhi month—which stretches from the middle of December to mid January—his parents managed to earn a little more as fortune tellers for slum dwellers preparing for the festival of Pongal. But these odd jobs did little to make ends meet, and…

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN any other Thursday, had it not gone terribly wrong. On the morning of 9 July 2015, Mohammed Fahad was headed to school with his sister, Shahala, and Abdul Anas, a friend. The alley that ran from their house to the government higher-secondary school in Kalliot, a village in the Kasaragod district of north Malabar in Kerala, had for years been a venue for idle chatter, for arguments about favourite cricketers and actors, for minor fights over chocolates, books and stickers. Fahad was eight years old. Shahala was 11. They had grown up in a working-class Muslim family with communist sympathies. Despite the growing communalisation of north Malabar over the years, they harboured no insecurities about their identity. Kalliot has a history of communal harmony between its…

ON 6 DECEMBER 2018 , the chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, told the residents of the Vikaspuri colony, in west Delhi, that the Election Commission had removed three million names from its electoral rolls. Kejriwal was inaugurating sewer lines, which he said would also cover over thirty other unauthorised colonies in the neighbourhood. Vikaspuri is home to a large number of settlers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, who are often referred to as Purvanchalis. Kejriwal claimed that along with the names of 1.5 million Purvanchalis, eight hundred thousand Muslims and four hundred thousand Baniyas—who rank third in the Hindu caste hierarchy—had also been removed from the voter list, at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The basis for this allegation, he said, was an “internal analysis” of surnames…

THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI Uzma Aslam Khan Uzma Aslam Khan’s historical novel is set in the Andaman islands in the mid-twentieth century, when it functioned as penal colony for prisoners of the British empire. It follows two siblings, whose father is sent to the islands after being convicted, and chronicles the upheaval in their lives when Japanese forces occupy the island. The novel, which is partly based on real stories that Khan excavated, also explores the lives of women prisoners on the island. CONTEXT, 380 PAGES, R 699 CASTE AS SOCIAL CAPITAL THE COMPLEX PLACE OF CASTE IN INDIAN SOCIETY R Vaidyanathan Vaidyanathan’s book examines the complex workings of caste across economic and social structures. Its emphasis is on the ways that caste functions as social capital…

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s entry into Uttar Pradesh’s politics is linked to the odd predicament that the Congress faces in the state. It won 44 seats in 2014 and must at least triple its tally in this year’s Lok Sabha elections in order to lead a coalition government, in the event that the National Democratic Alliance is unable to form one. The Congress could achieve this by performing exceptionally well in states where it is in direct competition with the Bharatiya Janata Party, which spearheads the NDA, or where it is part of an alliance. In states where the Congress is a marginal player, it is dependent on regional outfits to substantially reduce the BJP’s 2014 tally of 282 seats. Uttar Pradesh is one of the states where the Congress has…

FOR TWO DAYS IN MARCH 2017 , over seven hundred academics and vice chancellors from 51 state and central universities gathered in Delhi University to learn how to bring the “true nationalist narrative” to academia. The closed-door event was called the Gyan Sangam—knowledge summit—and one of its main speakers was Mohan Bhagwat, the sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The topics under discussion, reportedly, were the “cultural onslaught on educational system,” the “colonisation” of intellectuals and the resurgence of nationalism in academia. According to its website, the Gyan Sangam is an “initiative started in 2016 to create a platform for positive nationalistic academicians.” The site quotes Vivekananda, stating “all sciences originated in Bharat.” These workshops are organised by the RSS-affiliated Prajna…

{ONE} THE HISTORY OF THE RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH in northeast India begins in 1946. In October that year, Dadarao Parmarth, Vasantrao Oak and Krishna Paranjpe first set foot in the province of Assam, which included most of what is today northeastern India. The three pracharaks—fulltime RSS workers—established the region’s first shakhas—branches—in Guwahati, Dibrugarh and Shillong, where their recruits congregated every day. After the RSS adherent Nathuram Godse assassinated MK Gandhi, on 30 January 1948, the organisation was banned across India. After the ban was lifted the following year, MS Golwalkar, the RSS’s second sarsanghchalak—supreme leader—sent Thakur Ram Singh to oversee the organisation’s work in Assam. Singh remained in the role until 1971. By 1975, every district in Assam had a shakha. Today, according to Shankar Das, the RSS’s head of…

1936–37 1951–52 1957 1962 1967 1977 1980 1984 1989 1991 1996 1996 1998 2004 2014…

When Aditya Dhar’s Uri: The Surgical Strike released in January this year, the defence minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, tweeted a series of videos from a cinema hall in Bengaluru, where she watched the film with war veterans. One video showed a crowd brandishing national flags and shouting slogans such as “Indian army zindabad!” Another showed Sitharaman gleefully leading the chorus of the film’s tagline. “How’s the josh?” she called. “High, sir!” the viewers responded. She went on to tag the producer, director and actors of the film, commending the latter for their “brilliant performances.” As the country readies itself for elections this year, a spate of films featuring blatant support of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has been released. Apart from Uri, there is Abhijit Panse’s Thackeray and Vijay Ratnakar Gutte’s…

THE KUMBH MELA HAS OFTEN BEEN DESCRIBED, in both the Indian and the foreign press, as not just the largest Hindu gathering but as the largest human gathering of any kind on earth. The mela is held every 12 years. The last Kumbh at Prayagraj—then still known as Allahabad—was held in 2013, while the next one is due in 2025. Halfway through the 12-year interval, an Ardh, or half, Kumbh is organised, as it was in Prayagraj from 15 January to 4 March this year. The pilgrims gather to bathe at the sangam—the holy confluence of the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, along with the mythical Saraswati—in order to cleanse themselves of their sins. With an estimated 150 million people in attendance, and over ₹ 4,000 crore spent on the infrastructure…

IN 1966 , when the writer Shamsur Rahman Faruqi was thinking of names for his new Urdu literary magazine, Teesha—axe, or adze—was the one that stood out first. A teesha is associated with Farhad, the stonemason in the Persian romance Khusraw and Shirin, who had to cut through a mountain and release a river of milk to prove his love for the princess Shirin. Faruqi wanted to attempt something ambitious with his magazine too—he hoped to free Urdu literature from the domination of imperial narratives. At that time, the Urdu literati had begun to recognise a sense of lethargy and the possibility of an imminent decline in Urdu literature. Indian intellectuals and writers had created the Progressive Writers’ Association, in 1935, in response to fascist and imperialist regimes. Conceived, in…